What Is It We Don’t Get; And How Come We Don’t Get it?
Joe Kagle

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In late 1999, Jim Perkins, a 1955 classmate of mine from Dartmouth College, proposed a discussion group around an intriguing topic, What Is It We Don’t Get; And How Come We Don’t Get It? On reviewing his theme for the discussion at the reunion, I began writing in March. I write through my thinking process and then begin to edit. It is first-shoot-the-arrows and then-paint-the-targets system. I came up with no solutions but a series of thoughts on why I did or did not get it on certain things since graduation: 1) bias and mindset, 2) background (leading to questions), 3) winning (the American dream), 4) race (the skin-I’m-livin’-in), 5) multicultural learning (getting out of your skin), 6) community awareness (it takes time), 7) data gathering (separating junk from living data), 8) business as usual (managing what I don’t get or don’t want to get), 9) creating something new (the unknowable until it is known), 10) revival (masking the new in the garb of the old), and 11) turn on the light (finding the cluster). I find that through some kind of metamorphosis I was slipping into the thought processes of the late 19th century Waco editor, William Cowper Brann, who published Brann’s Iconoclast to over a quarter million readers worldwide. As he said in his writing, “Why am I an Iconoclast?...Sir, I am a seeker of Truth... When you get an idea, put it on the anvil and bid the world hit it with the heaviest sledge. The more you hammer Truth the brighter it becomes.” So it is with this theme. It has haunted me for over a month and will not go away until I write out my thoughts. I am not particularly interested in what I did not get or when I got it, I am more interested in the processes that helped or hindered getting “it”. The process is useful (it opens doors); the data is just interesting (it fills rooms).

One: Bias and mindset. I never saw Dartmouth College when I attended as an academic experience. I almost flunked out because grades were not what I judged my learning upon. It was a place to search for some truths, some universals that I could fit into the fabric of my life. Some of these truths came inside the classroom, many came without. Dartmouth came along when I needed isolation, introspection and withdrawal from the so-called “real world”. I had some good guys on the faculty who understood the rebel in me. Maybe I have never lived in what many around me call “the real world”. I live in a world that is ruled by, “May the beauty we love be what we do.” I search for beauty in the world. That is not equating “beauty” with pleasure or pretty or nice. Sometimes beauty is truth. The first duty of any human being is to see what is there. Not judge it; not give it a name; but to find the verbs, adverbs, adjectives, lines, colors, shapes to “envision” it. Of course, we name it sometime in the process. But the name is not “getting it”- all it does is name it. You use naming things as a way to get others to think outside the name. When I don’t get it with what I see, I immerse myself in it if possible. This has gotten me in trouble at times but it works most of the time. Once I see what is there, I can determine to act or not. One winter on Guam I had to be Santa Clause to get beyond the clerk at the licensing bureau.

My son, Christopher, is mentally-retarded. I took one whole summer trying to “get it” as a mentally-retarded person. I read “Flowers for Algernon” and tried to live it. I took advanced classes at MIT which were out of my mental reach. They were beyond what I could learn. I played basketball with young kids who made me feel inferior and stupid. But I knew that I could walk away and be me. I will never get what it feels like to be black or Hispanic or female or homosexual or mentally retarded, although I have tried to live in their skin. I have tried to learn what it feels like to be someone else. I still try. I work for the Association of Retarded Citizens, being honored as “Volunteer of the Year” nationally a few years ago, but I never truly could get what my son goes through each day as a retarded young man who is also adopted from Korea. I do what all of us do who care- try, and if we do try, people will allow us into their world. What I get from my son is a special kind of love without any strings.

Two: Background and Questions. My thoughts on the subject of “What is it we don’t get; And how come we don’t get it?” come with great feelings of ambivalence. I have searched myself and certainly found areas of “data” that I did not get, did not want and still question whether it was worth exploring with the limited time in one life. How can we tell the difference between “junk” and “living” data? It was in 1994 that I read that the mid-point for information (data) was roughly 1905. There had been as much data gathered before 1905 as has been gathered since 1905. And now it is 2000, so when will it double again? Do we have to know all the data that is generated? Isn’t a lot of it “junk” and how can we know the difference?

I do not have to retain (or get) all data that is feed to us each day but I do have to understand the underlying structures that give the data meaning. For me in the last twenty years it has been systems thinking. Up to 1905, the question was “What is it?” All that changed with science and cubism. The question for much of the 20th century is “What does it do?” The question right now for me is “What is the underlying form?” because now function follows form, instead of form following function. In simplest terms, one can see it in two recent real estate deals in Waco. A sale came up to sell the old highschool downtown. They had troubles selling it. It looked like a highschool. It is a building where the function of education was translated into the form of the building. At the supermarket, the form was established first (where it did not look like a supermarket, just a box with holes) and then the function was applied, selling household needs. When they moved out a new company took over without missing a beat in terms of the new function. Function followed form.

In an elementary way, I saw systems thinking in college. I have never been interested in objects but their relationships. Maybe that comes from living poor early in life and not feeling the hurt of not-having-things. My family did not have the problem of wealth. Our wealth was relationships. We had an openness to ideas, images and “out of the box” thinking. “They” used to joke that there were three ways to get out of Pittsburgh: play football, join the mob or die. I choose football and added a fourth, art. If you have no material things to lose, things do not mean a great deal. What you do learn to do is “hustle”. In the section of Pittsburgh where I grew up, you use a little to create a lot. I have always been a hustler. I did not get the corporate structure of thought at home or at Dartmouth although later in my career I learned that the university and museum systems are based upon hierarchies (that is, not making waves except if you have needed ability). My career is making waves. I made artistic waves at Dartmouth too. Later, I was an outsider to the Beatniks and then the hippies in San Francisco after college (and yet in that culture). I took a position as head of an art department at the University of Guam because of certain personal protests to America’s new wars in the Orient and its image as policeman of the world. I watched the bombings from afar as the black bombers flew out at dawn and returned at sunset in the early 1970’s. I still am an artist in this American society which does not value the arts. Of course, I missed the insider perspective. Probably still do although I understand the system enough to use it. I joined Rotary and Chamber of Commerce, was asked to help shape the curriculum for Leadership Waco. What I got from that was patience. It took eight years to get others to see that History Day could be “A River Runs Through It”, Political Day was “We the People” and Cultural Day was “An Expanded Self”. Categories and names rule our minds. The naming process must be rediscovered every few years. In Waco, I was asked to take a greater role in advising on community life after the Davidian Tragedy. I truly believe that I am useful now to the establishment because: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven....” I do believe that luck happens to those who prepare.

Three: Winning. As a hustler, winning is important. You get out of poverty by winning, you get out of the steel mills and Pittsburgh by winning, you graduate from Dartmouth by winning, you get a string of successful jobs by winning. Thankfully, my parents taught me winning with integrity. “Personality is when everyone is watching,” my father said. “Integrity is shown when no one is watching”. I played sports from the time that my minor league baseball-player father started my brothers and myself (as far back as I can remember to now). Winning conditioned how I viewed the world, even at Dartmouth. It was important to play football and letter. It was important, finally, to get my grades to the place where I could graduate. I needed to compete with others for my written thesis in English. They had better overall grades. I got the final A on my thesis. I got it because it never entered my mind to not take a risk. Caution was not part of street-smart education. I learned to write grants for museums, getting 50-70% of those that I wrote. As Director of a museum, it was expected that I would win or I would not have my job. For many of us from the inner city, winning is the America message but you miss something.

It was only when my son Chris started running the 200 meters in Special Olympics about fifteen years ago that I learned what true winning means. I coached him to run fast and he had the long legs of a North Korean youth. He was naturally fast. The big race came up. I told him that I would cheer him on. I would stand at the side of the last 100 meters and yell, “Run, Chris, run. Win, Chris, win.” He was twenty yards in front of his best friend as he rounded the turn with this proud father yelling, “Win!” About ten yards from the finish line, he stopped, waited, took his friend’s hand and ran across the line with him. I stopped yelling, finally finding out what winning really is. Oh, I knew the quote from Martha Graham long before that moment, “I am only in competition with that person I know I can become” but it had no meaning until then. Since then, I am still looking for winning but now it is win-win. Never again will it be me not you. I got it from my retarded son, Chris. I now understand what the Chinese for centuries have said: a painter is an amateur until his forties, an artist in his fifties and a master after sixty. I got it a little with Thoreau at Dartmouth but it really did not sink in fully until my son showed me. In college it was classes in English, later it was Chinese thought and writings. There are places to get it but there are some universals that take time to sink in and transcend the immediate data gathering.

Four: Racism. As a child of the inner city, I knew early on that America was not a melting pot (“stew pot” maybe but not a melting pot). That fact hits you in the face when recent statistics come out that Texas will be more Hispanic and Afro-American than Anglo by 2005? I did not think about that at Dartmouth. I was used to playing football with many races. Pittsburgh was a stew pot. I knew about racism while living in Palau, in Japan, in Guam, in China (Taiwan) in the 60’s and 70’s. More abroad than here, I found. You can’t see the world without knowing that most of the people on it are not white. Only the Chinese are white (according to their definition)! Langston Hughes became a needed poet for me when I returned to the States. My son and wife are reminders that people not related by blood can live together. My daughter tells me that we are not related by blood but I know different. She fears the reflection of her father.

Five: Multicultural Learning. Picasso in 1905 knew that the next giant step in art was seeing third world images (Africa). The West had ignored it for centuries. My students are not taught it in high school now. Dartmouth’s education had ignored it when I was a student (although I had gotten it from Carnegie Museum as a child in Pittsburgh). I got a D in World Art History because I thought it should have been more than just Western. I knew about “breakup”, “gestalt thinking”, and “cubism” in high school through the arts, but I did not get it in the classroom at Dartmouth. It was the concert hall and John Cage that reinforced “break up” for me. After that concert, Cage was more of an influence than Robert Frost on my thinking about contemporary art.. Maybe the arts get it before all the other ways of seeing. I remember sitting in an emptied hall at Dartmouth, listening to John Cage and David Tuder play on prepared pianos (just one of six left in the hall from a much larger audience who started the performance). Again, later though, I did not get it, did not translate Cage to Robert Wilson, when I first saw Wilson’s play, CivilWars (two acts in 4 hours of a complete 17- hour drama in Cambridge), but it stayed in my gut. I got it shortly after that- before Bob became a world figure (better known in Prague and Paris than in his home town of Waco). Mostly, I get the stuff on the edge of society that later becomes mainstream. I get the contemporary arts that deal with life as it is, holding off whether I like it or not. I get the ideas from art that mirrors tomorrow in other fields.

Six: Community Awareness. When does a city get it? I live in Waco. Not Waco, Tx. or Waco, United States of America. I live in the word “Waco” now since 1993. Before that, city leaders did not get it that we needed representation of everyone at the table to make decisions on the future of Waco. After the Branch Davidians, the table was expanded to those left off, including artists. Before 1993, I was a participant as a museum director. After 1993, I was a participant as an artist who saw “outside the box”. Sadly, with that horrible tragedy, the country never got it. They saw Waco as a place of backwoods Bible-belt thinking where, as the London Times wrote, “Waco is a one-horse town where the horse died.” One way to have a city get it is make its citizens mad.

After the fire died out, this community created the “Community of Cities”, 51 cities in Central Texas who would work together if another disaster happened. We created Waco 20/20 to envision the future. Out of this came the idea of a downtown arts district. It was with this background that I wrote 237 world class architects to submit proposals for a new art museum complex downtown. Every city has an “edifice complex” after a disaster. Six billion dollars had been spent on the word “Waco” by the world’s press. We received 48 favorable replies and many more that said they were filled with work but wished that they had the time. We selected Rick Sundberg of Seattle to help change “an undeserved image of death and destruction to a deserved one of life and creativity”. Sundberg was selected over Philip Johnson and William McDonough (a Dartmouth graduate recently featured in Time Magazine). The image would not have been intriguing to this caliber of architect without death and destruction (international publicity). We get it sometimes after a national wakeup call. In some way, the nation still does not get it. The Branch Davidians are not the same as the early Davidians, who were closer to the Quakers than the militant Branch Davidians.

Waco has been on the map for many of its characters. In the 1890’s, when William Cowper Brann criticized everything from prohibition to promiscuity and bureaucrats to Baptists...mostly Baptists, he put the quiet, obscure little hamlet on the world map. Brann and his Iconoclast left few stones unturned in exposing the cold, clammy underbelly of hypocrisy. He left a legacy that rubs off on those who have followed. When I was thinking of taking a job in Waco, I asked Robert Wilson, a Waco-born artist, to advise me. He said, “There is much to love about Waco, and much to fight against.” Brann’s fight with Baylor University and the Baptists is still being waged by others, but the Baptists are winning. They silenced Brann. When an enraged reader gunned down its editor in Waco, April Fool’s Day, 1898, The Iconoclast was the nation’s most controversial monthly. The more that things change; the more they stay the same. Some cities must repeat getting it.

Seven: Data gathering. We live in an age where there is more junk data generated than living data? Living data is stuff that helps us understand others, love ourselves and others better, and form some system to decode/sort additional data. I don’t know if there are many “don’t get it” individuals who search out “living data” but miss the junk data. I think there are more now than in the past who attempt that journey. Jim Perkins is correct: “Caution must guide the picking and choosing” as an editor who is responsible to many others. For the artist in me, caution has never been one of my strong suits. The artist jumps into the unknown from the cliff of caution, not noticing the fear, and not caring if he or she lands at all. The unknown made known is all that counts. The artist in every man or woman can tear up mistakes on paper before they reach the gallery walls. In the studio, any information is useful if it is interesting. One way to get it is live by this concept: first you shoot the arrows, then paint the targets. As I said, function follows form.

Eight: Business as Usual (Managing when I don’t get it). In 1976, I turned my back on being a full professor at the University of Guam with tenure and came back to the states. It was based on racism against my son and the need for special education in the states. I became a director of a museum in Arkansas. It did not take me long to realize two important things: a) I did not have to get it on all things to manage the staff or the museum, and b) I had to learn how to work with bosses who were woman. I had a great teacher in my first board chairman. She helped me get it on how to work with predominantly a workforce of women. She taught me kitchen planning and letting go. Later, I learned that it was called, “management by walking around”. What I had not gotten in college or my teaching was situational leadership: if they do not know, tell them; if they know a little, show them; if they know as much as you, work with them; and if they know more than you do, get out of the way but find the resources to get the job done. I got that on the job and at the Museum Management Institute at the University of California. Now, I hire what I don’t know or don’t wish to learn with a staff that has at least one researcher, doer and feeler. That allowed me to do what I do best, create new things. I may not know what time it is but I can build you a new watch.

On April 14, The Art Museum of Waco and two other national arts programs will be featured by ABC Television. What was done over ten years was really empower children to manage a museum. We built it in the school in an old boiler room, raised the money for construction, exchanged art exhibitions with children around the world, trained the kids to take charge as director, curator, registrar, etc. and get out of their way so that they could make their own mistakes. We helped only when asked. Some of the teachers still do not get it (thank goodness the principal does). Teachers tend to take over, not letting the kids truly manage their museum, but year by year it is getting better.

Nine: Creating Something New. When I am creating something in a direction where I have not gone, the first thing is to clear my mind to let ideas fly in. Ideas (birds) only fly in an open sky. I do not get it until it is there. Maybe that is a metaphor for anything that we do not get. Until it is there in some kind of clear form, we do not get it. When I had my quintuple heart by-pass surgery in 1998, I worked in the halls, dragging the tubes and bottles everywhere, drawing everything that I could see in this “clean, well-lighted place” called a hospital. Hospitals are not created as works of art. They are factories for healing. The art had to come out of the seeing. Hundreds of drawings later the first glimpse of a new idea came forth. What I got was a vision of order in a strict structure with the colors of life shining through the rigidity of the architecture. The work is probably the most “alive” that I have done. It is a celebration of living. It is a celebration of architectonic form also. You get it when the need is great or you don’t. Life or death is a clear message for anyone. I get it in my own life and in the life of this community, Waco. Cities can die too if they don’t get it. Cities grow, not because one person gets it, but a team of talents get it. I watched the growth of Pittsburgh at the knee of its mayor, my great uncle David Lawrence. I remember how much he and Mellon hated each other and yet put that aside to collaborate on reshaping our dirty steel city. You get it if you put ancient hatreds to the side. Maybe “getting it” is reshaping priorities.

After the surgery, I lost 40 pounds through exercise and diet while creating over 300 new paintings in late 1998 and early 1999. If the need is great enough, you get it. Much later, seeing the administrator of the hospital at a cocktail party, I suggested a bronze frog in one corner of the bathroom, maybe a single drawn line across the pristine, unbroken surface of the wall, a book of limericks beside each bed, and different colored hospital garb. Have not seen any change yet! They just don’t get it. Wellness is a human decision, not a condition of “well-lighted, clean places”.

Ten: Revival (masking the new in the garb of the old). As I take this trip which was started with an idea, “What is it we don’t get; And how come we don’t get it?”, it forces me to separate the first from the more important question, the second part. Even in this process of thinking about the idea, I tend to use revival as a mask to see where I am. I go to my upbringing in Pittsburgh, those I knew, my college days, etc. While at Dartmouth many of us were still in my parent’s time as we revived those aspects of that time which seemed to fit our lives then. How many of us still do that as a way to get it in the present? When anyone starts to look for the new, revival thinking is where we start. As I look at the arts today, it is multiple revivals woven together. Maplethorpe in his few erotic photographs was doing a similar thing as Rubens and Goya in “Saturn Devouring His Sons”. Each of those societies were repulsed by the truth. Mankind creates enormous brutal acts. I go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and am hit in the stomach with my outrage, the power of the images. It is a surreal, yet real, experience but I would not advocate its closing because it disturbs me by reviving images of the past. Boys Don’t Cry is real to experience but I would not boycott its showing. I see it in a Goya frame of mind. Bosnia and Cambodia were as terrible for the human psyche. I defended Maplethorpe in an editorial in Waco while also defending anyone’s right to walk away from what they saw. Outrage in Congress was misplaced. The Pentagon has done much more to outrage those of us who see millions misplaced. More money is spent on military bands on bases than all the symphonies and museums in American.

Revival thinking is a way to deal with the new. We clothe it in the garb of the past, just giving it new names, colors, emphasis. But when Van Gogh revived Rembrandt in the Potato Eaters, he went back two centuries; when Picasso started Cubism, he revived images that had been around since the beginning of man’s time (just ignored by Europe). Right now, we are reviving the nineties of the 20th century. Revivals are speeding up. I will not get it someday when a commercial revives the year before in a 30-second sound bite. What happens when the speed of revival outdistances the new? Will there be a new and improved? I knew some of the people who truly believed in David Koresh? I did not know them well but what I knew was that they were seeking a Fundamentalist version of older values, a true revival. Did any of us get it in Waco until the fire? It is hard to get “violence” as a solution to a life problem. Is a CLASS REUNION a form of revival? Revival is certainly one place to start when thinking about things which are not yet in our consciousness. Like many pleasures, I guess it is the use that makes it healthy or not. As an artist, I revive images of the past when the present seems lacking in interest. It is just that I can’t live there too long or I miss the moment which is the essence of creative thought.

Eleven: Turn On The Light (finding the clusters). The problem when I don’t get it is that I read the details and miss the cluster. A cluster is where forces come together to be the essence of a larger picture. I sat in an architect’s office, when we were interviewing architects from all over America, and listened as he told us about: “There is the goal and we have the ball. The trick is hitting the goal.” Not knowing enough to keep my mouth shut, I said: “No, your job is to make a beautiful line of flight for the ball. Your job is to help us find the cluster from which the structure of the building will grow.” He did not get it so I drew it for him. “This,” I said, “is a basic cluster.”

“Anyone can draw the form once that cluster is found”. What I thought was: we can see it in Rubens’ Sabine women, Matisse’s drawings, Maplethorpe erotic and flower photographs, the pathways in buildings, the decisions made in politics, highway planning, etc. The image is not ball-goal which is built on winning but on a natural cluster of forces which creates many things. I drew this:

and this:

“Hosta: Honey Belles”

But I could have draw cloverleaves of highways, junctures of decisions where a committee gets together, Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings, Wilson’s stage designs, river junctures and the Venus of Willendorf. Cluster finding is the essence of getting it. Maybe the Iconoclast said it best why some of us do not get it when he wrote, “Nature plays no favorites. When she gives a man a lower-case brain she makes amends by supplying him with a display-type mouth.” We all miss the clusters at time.

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